Raja Gopichand Bhandar

Running a shop in Kirana Bazar is always a bit of a scramble. Raja Gopichand Bhandar has been sitting here in the Kirana Oli area of Itwari for years. If you know this part of town, you know it’s crowded and the lanes are narrow. We spend most of our time weighing out bags of pulses or checking the latest stock that arrived on the rickshaws. My father used to sit on this same stool, and not much has changed since then. The walls could probably use a fresh coat of paint, but there’s never really a quiet moment to do it. Customers come in and out, some just to chat for a minute while they buy their groceries. It gets dusty in the summer and the heat in Itwari can be something else. We keep the registers mostly in our heads or on scraps of paper. It’s a messy business sometimes, with flour dust everywhere, but it’s what we do. We don’t have a website or any of that stuff, just the physical shop where people know where to find us. Dealing with wholesalers is the toughest part, always arguing over prices and delivery times. But at the end of the day, when we pull the shutters down, there’s a sense of satisfaction. It’s just a regular local shop serving the neighborhood people. We try to be fair and keep things simple for everyone who walks through the door.